Interactions - September/October 2011

ing the key aspects of production, designers can expose provenance to enable reflective inquiry.

A second genre of tools focuses on attrition and decay. In Zoran and Buechley’s digital restoration [ 7], handmade pottery that has broken is then “restored” using a 3-D printer. The printer accentuates the broken edges by reassembling and transforming the object remains. Here digital production incorporates new materials and techniques while foregrounding the engagements (breakage and wear) that led to the object’s current state. The object evolves through rearranging traces of use and, in turn, ideas of provenance.

Alongside delineations of use and skill, a third genre of tools involves sharing experiences of creation and ownership. Our Spyn system [ 8], for example, enables knitters to digitally annotate stitches while crafting, associating audio and visual recordings with locations on knit fabric. In trial deployments, knitters connected fabric with personal reflections at the time of production. By recalling these annotations, recipients of the knit articles became aware of the knitters’ investments of effort and care. Such tools might enrich production work by capturing provenance through digital media, connecting intimate object interactions with processes of exchange and use.

Each genre of tools traces the use, technique, and ownership of artifacts in particular ways. They suggest paths for valuing processes of creation and trajectories of use that enable us to consider which elements of an artifact should remain stable over time and which materials, digital and non-digital, matter in the ongoing production

of value. They provide a starting point for considering how we might design evocative traces of provenance.

Beyond handwork, this work suggests that designers can benefit from becoming sensitive to both the practical and affective dimensions of skill. What makes an artifact meaningful is bound up with how its traces are made, remade, and interpreted over time. In illustrating how materials figure into these handwork processes, I hope to encourage the design of technologies that meaningfully engage the expressivity of material histories [ 9].

eNdNotes:

1. Joyce, r. From place to place: provenience, provenance, and archaeology. Unpublished paper from the theoretical Archeology Meeting in Los Angeles, 2009. 2. Ingold, t. transformations of the line: traces, threads and surfaces. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 8, 1 (2010), 10–35. 3. Here the term provenance is taken to mean the itinerary that something follows in order to reach its current condition, beginning with its creation [ 1]. 4. participant names have been changed. 5. For a counter example, see Grossman, t., Matejka, J., and Fitzmaurice, G. chronicle: capture, exploration, and playback of document workflow histories. Proc. of the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. AcM, New York, 2010, 143–152. 6. pierce, J. and paulos, E. Materializing energy. Proc. of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. AcM, New York, 2010, 113–122. 7. Zoran, A. and buechley, L. Hybrid reAssemblage: A voyage of loss and acceptance through craft and digital fabrication. 2011. In press. 8. rosner, D.K., and. ryokai, K. Spyn: Augmenting the creative and communicative potential of craft. Proc. of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. AcM, New York, 2010, 2407–2416. 9. Mccullough, M. Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand. MIt press, cambridge, MA, 1998.

About the Author Daniela K. rosner is a ph. D. can-didate at Uc berkeley’s School of Information. Her research focuses on the interplay between comput-ing, craft, and the creative com-munities that surround them.